"Levee monitoring sinks in Legislature"

I'm not familiar with the upsides and downsides of this bill. If it wasn't passed by our legislators in Sacramento, that probably means there's something good about it. But, it's also supported by the Sierra Club, meaning there's probably something wrong with it. Nonetheless:

A bill that some called a "baby steps" effort to deal with California's colossal flood risks did not pass out of the Legislature this week, prompting concern that there is little appetite to deal with the messy, expensive problem of neglected levees.

Images of a submerged New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina helped revive the bill from a months-long slumber. But those pictures of death and despair did not prompt enough votes in the state Senate to bring the bill forward as an urgency measure before the session closed Thursday night.

The bill, AB 1665 by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, would have renamed the state Reclamation Board as the Central Valley Flood Management Board. It would have assigned the board the task of assessing 1,600 miles of aging levees on the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, mapping flood-hazard areas on those rivers, and annually notifying property owners in those hazard zones.

The bill was sponsored by the state Department of Water Resources...

"Even with any urgency that may have happened with Katrina and the levees in New Orleans, trying to do anything ambitious is really hard," said Jim Metropulos, a legislative analyst for the Sierra Club, which supported the bill. "Flood issues get to be very contentious."

..."We think it was a very modest effort," said Mike Hardesty, president of the California Central Valley Flood Control Association, which represents 80 levee maintenance districts...

California · Sun, 09/11/2005 - 04:52 · · Importance: 1